Tight-binding treatment of the coupling effect in metallic nanostructures Xi Bin, Xu Hao, Xiao Shiyi, Hao Jiaming and Zhou Lei Department of Physics, Fudan University, Shanghai 200433, China Conclusions: We studied the coupling effect between localized surface plasmons in gold nanoparticle chains. The tight-binding method (TBM) combined with the full-wave simulation not only allows us to predict the resonance frequencies of coupled nanoparticles, but it also allows us to quantitively define the coupling strength between localized surface plasmons on nanoparticles. Moreover, the TBM could be used to identify the dark mode which is usually hard to see in transmittance spectra in very weakly coupled systems. References: [1] Yong Xu, et al., Phys. Rev. E 62, 7389 (2000). [2] Hao Xu, to be published. [3] A. Raman and S. Fan, Phys. Rev. Lett. 104, 087401 (2010).